The new domains could offer small businesses a way to get an address that more closely relates to the products and services they sell than what’s available today. For example, the owner of flower shop might be able to get an address ending in .florist.

The new domains may also be attractive to entrepreneurs and others looking to secure a Web address that’s already been taken on .com, the most popular domain by far.

Do you plan on buying an address within one of the new domains? Take our poll, after the jump… Read More »

Glam Media, one of the largest digital media companies, has hired magazine publishing veteran Dan Lagani as its first president and chief revenue officer, the company is expected to announce Tuesday.

The move represents a jump from old media companies to new for Mr. Lagani, 50, who most recently served as president of North America for the Reader’s Digest Association. He was previously served as president of Fairchild Fashion Group, group publisher of Conde Nast Bridal Group, publisher of Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies Home Journal and publisher of George magazine.

Glam, a network of largely female-focused lifestyle websites founded in 2004, is the seventh-largest web property in the U.S. with 89 million unique visitors in September, according to comScore.

MetroPCS, the mobile operator in the midst of being taken over by T-Mobile, put out a strong set of quarterly results this morning, with profit more than doubling and revenues increasing thanks to more customers taking up its LTE services.

But beyond the numbers, the company also announced a new service worth paying attention to, even as the company is subsumed into its larger new owner. It will be the first US operator to introduce joyn, the global mobile industry’s newest weapon intended to defend its besieged fortress from the onslaught of app-based competition.

Smartphone users subscribed to monthly all-you-can-eat data plans can now bypass mobile operators in many cases, installing voice over IP apps like Skype and Viber, text messaging apps like Apple’s iMessage or WhatsApp, or Google Voice, which offers a whole suite of traditional phone services all via an internet connection. Those kind of so called over-the-top competitors are hitting top lines hard — some analysts think text messaging apps alone cost the industry 9% of its messaging revenues in 2011.

While the mobile industry has been largely powerless to stop the trend, operators have rolled out wave after wave of services intended to keep a slice of the pie for themselves, although few have been as successful as the third-party options.

The latest effort is joyn, the branded implementation of a new set of industry standards known as Rich Communication Suite-enhanced (RCS-e) that aim to make services like web messaging, video chat, file sharing and internet calling a standardised experience for all mobile users, similar to the text messages or phone calls of the past. RCS-e is being pushed by the GSM Association, the global mobile industry body.

The idea is that if you have a joyn-enabled handset from an operator, any of your contacts who also have the system will be available options like a video chat or photo-sharing as they are for a phone call, with no installations, registrations or account set-up needed. The tag line for the system is “It’s just there, it just works.”

For now, in the U.S., it’s will only be “just there” if you have one particular handset — the Samsung Galaxy Attain 4G — and download joyn from the app store. MetroPCS tells customers with other handsets to “stay tuned for availability,” so it’s very much a wait-and-see thing: firstly how quickly the service can be rolled out to other users on the same network, but more importantly, for whether the bigger players in the U.S. market decide to adopt the system.

Right now, the service that is meant to be a universal standardized competitor to walled-gardens like iMessage is, in reality, a much smaller walled garden that almost nobody can access.

In the longer run, industry-wide adoption of something like joyn seems like the only way mobile operators could hope to remain the primary master of their customers’ communications, rather than the kind of “dumb pipe” provider of an internet connection and nothing more, which is the dread scenario for most operators.

The alternative is to play up the one big thing that keeps the old-school phone number system relevant in the age of the internet: that everybody is using it. For the operators, extending that universal appeal into the world of web-based communications has big potential.

In Europe, T-Mobile has been an early adopter of the service, suggesting the German company may look positively on it here when it takes control of MetroPCS. For the other big operators, there is no sign of a launch anytime soon, although the case for the service seems compelling. But we’ll believe it when we see it. Read More »